Sunday, September 14, 2014

Can the "best possible life" get much better?

Someone is sure to try to tell me that the best possible
life is a bit like Groundhog Day – it is as good as life can get. If I thought that
the quality of life was just about emotional states I would agree. But there is more to life than emotional states, even though emotional
states are very important.

The question is meant to be about the extent to which people
perceive that it is possible for the quality of the best possible life to
continue to get better, e.g. as a result of further advances in medical science
or communications.

In happiness surveys people are often asked to evaluate
their lives according to the Cantril ladder. The relevant question, as asked in
Gallup’s World Poll, is as follows:

“Please imagine a
ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of
the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the
ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say
you personally feel you stand at this time?”

I have not been able to find research that directly relates
to the question of how perceptions of the best possible life differ between
countries and change over time. Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough, or in
the right places. If any readers can steer me in the direction of relevant
research I would be most grateful.

A few years ago, Angus Deaton, who has been associated with
the Gallup World Poll, speculated as follows about the meaning of “the best
possible life”:

“A simpler interpretation of the Gallup World Poll findings
is that when asked to imagine the best and worst possible lives for themselves,
points "10" and "0" on the scale, people use a global standard.
Danes understand how bad life is in Togo and other poor places, and the
Togolese, through television and newspapers, understand how good life is in
Denmark or other high-income countries.

Such an interpretation is also consistent with Easterlin's
conclusion that the "best possible life for you" is a shifting
standard that will move upward with rising living standards. Thus, we might
expect the Danes to continue to maintain an average rating of 8 as national
income rises, provided they stay in the same position in the global income
rankings. If this interpretation is correct, it would be an indication of how
much the globalization of information has affected the perceptions of
populations worldwide - because the consistently high correlation between
income and satisfaction could not have existed in its absence.”

I have some problems with the first paragraph of the quote. Given
the wording of the question, it seems likely that perceptions of the best
possible life are strongly influenced by knowledge of what kinds of lives it
might be possible for the respondent to live. There seems to be quite strong
evidence that the reference groups that rural people in China use to evaluate
their own satisfaction with life are their fellow-villagers. The reference
group changes when people move to the city. (See paper by John Knight and
Ramani Gunatilaka.) That seems to be related to the “paradox of happy peasants
and frustrated achievers” discussed by Carol Graham. If people evaluate their
lives according to a rural village reference point of the best possible life,
they may not be overstating their happiness but they are basing their judgement
of their well-being on imperfect knowledge of what is possible. In order to
shed more light on such matters it would be useful to conduct surveys of
migrants from rural to urban areas using the ACSA methodology discussed in a recent post.

When we consider high income countries, it seems reasonable
to expect that perceptions of the potential for the best possible life to
improve would be closely related to perceptions of whether today’s youth will
have a better life than their parents. Gallup’s surveys for the United States
suggest that from 1998 to 2008 around two-thirds of Americans were optimistic,
and only one-third pessimistic, about whether today’s youth would have a better
life than their parents. Since then, however, Americans have become equally
divided on that question. That probably reflects ongoing economic uncertainty
in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.

It would be interesting to know to what extent people who
consider themselves to be living the best possible life at present are
optimistic about the potential for life to get even better. I don’t have access
to the detailed Gallup data, but data from the World Values Survey relating to
people who are “completely satisfied” with their lives (score of 10 on the WVS rating
scale) may be relevant. The following chart is based on data for high income
countries in the latest round of surveys (2010-14) who claim to be completely
satisfied with their lives.

The chart shows that being completely satisfied with life
does not prevent people from being in agreement with the proposition that
because of science and technology there will be more opportunities for the next
generation. Optimism about such matters might even help to explain why some people are completely satisfied with their lives.

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